The opioid crisis is happening all around us in the background of society, as overdoses from street drugs and prescription painkillers continue to rise. Talk to your local firemen and paramedics and you'll quickly realize the situation is sucking up our public resources while ruining lives and destroying families. A crisis as devastating as this should be top priority for a sane society, however this issue gets very little media attention, all the while, pharmaceutical companies are reaping massive profits, and globally, the black market for illegal heroin has become a global industry.

Pharmaceutical makers are tweaking their product lines to supply more options for opiate addicts: stronger pills, weaker pills, new guidelines, overdose antidotes, and so on. Yet, none of this addresses the root of the problem, instead only targeting the symptoms of the crisis, and a bigger idea is needed to interrupt the trend.

"The drugs these users choose are often opiates, the most powerful painkillers we know. In my years as a palliative care physician, I daily had reason to be grateful for the easing of suffering the opiate medications afforded my patients afflicted with cancer and other pain-inducing conditions. But opiates also soothe emotional pain; in fact, the suffering of psychic pain is experienced in the same part of the brain as that of physical pain." ~ Gabor Maté

Getting to the root, though, why is there so much pain which needs to be numbed in our society? This is the big question that when addressed is the only thing which can offer a way out of this crisis.

Maté asserts this epidemic is cultural, not physical, noting that the world we've created is, 'devoid of a deep appreciation of the complexity of addiction and its sources in human experience.'

Human experience, the most vital notion in healing addiction. What is it about the human experience that calls so many of us into the abyss?

"What engenders such unbearable pain in human beings that they would knowingly risk their very lives to escape it?" ~ Gabor Maté

Regarding human experience, psychiatrist Thomas Hora wrote:

"The meaning of all addictions could be defined as endeavours at controlling our life experiences with the help of external remedies. Unfortunately, all external means of improving our life experiences are double-edged swords: they are always good and bad. No external remedy improves our condition without, at the same time, making it worse."

Mate's primary hypothesis is that childhood trauma is the leading factor driving people to addiction, as he has personally seen in 12 years of working with addiction patients in urban Vancouver, BC, Canada.

"In my 12 years in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, ground zero for addiction in Canada, all my female patients reported sexual abuse in childhood, all the male patients abuse or neglect of one kind or another.

As large scale international epidemiological studies have repeatedly demonstrated, childhood adversity is at the core of the emotional patterns and psychological dynamics that drive addiction.

Further, childhood trauma shapes the physiology of the developing brain in ways that induce a susceptibility to addiction. Hence the addiction-prone person finds relief in substances that would not entice others, even after repeated exposure to the same drugs.

In turn, prolonged drug use also changes the brain in ways that further entrench the addictive drive." ~ Gabor Maté

Furthermore, he notes the need for a shift in how medical science looks at addiction is absolutely vital:

"And it would be of great help if all legal, medical and political professionals, as well as the general public, were informed of what modern research has taught us about child and brain development, and the tortured and manifold responses of the human psyche to early trauma. If the people now dying in this preventable epidemic were succumbing to a bacterial infection, we would declare a public emergency and mobilize to contain it." ~ Gabor Maté

Reader Comments

The deep state gets funded through drug sales. The CIA has perpetuated the drug trade both for profit and as a weapon. The US is now dominated be psychopaths. Only revolution can improve our condition.

L. Wood A deep state of self-hypnosis maintains a lack of light by denying true feelings to arise AS Communication, AS relationship.

Revolution re-seeds the condition just as true Feeling begins to rise. The true is aborted to a self-righteous raging hate that feels vindicated in enacting hate upon the haters.

A turnabout within self, can cease operating the denial script - whether as the psychopathic killer or any number of maskings.

Aligning in the true cannot use the hateful or evil other as the foundation and basis of self and life. One has to open a direct connection in alignment FOR joy in life in stead of setting a self-presentation AGAINST feared and hated power - that gives power TO fear and hate while SEEMING to escape with a split off sense of self-righteousness.

So yes to the revolution In Place - right here and now - in which a freshly aligned joy in being - extends that sense of life, worth and connection - without manipulative intent - as the vibrational quality of our true presence.

It isn't that an insane world operates insanely - but that sanity is not the gift of the state - so much as of reason and wholeness of being - the loss of which, sets up a state of defence.

Does it make any difference to the symptoms if I am healed at cause?

Are you so fixated in symptoms as to be unconscious of true cause?

Is that not the way the game of insanity perpetuates itself?

The US dropped its A as the globalist tool of a unipolar 'Order'. But imposing 'order' only generates 'chaos' which is then sucked for resources to fuel fantasy gratifications of a tiny split-off facet of the whole.

Do you want to persist in playing out a role for someone else's fantasy or realign with the truly creative - that moves you and moves through you to reflect to you - because you are not blocking the communication of life that it is and in which you are.

Things can get a lot worse. Change in and of itself is neutral. So being the change you want to meet - lives from conscious choice rather than an unconsciousness programming. I could have read your comment as accepted currency of fact. But its relative 'truths' operate within a mind-capture that we suffer from as a result of trying to use.

To release the addiction to the signal of mind capture - you have to not use mind for such purpose - and be brought back into true function - of recognizing and serving true being - rather than trying to force it into fantasy associations.

All these come from false self-assertion that seeks validation outside itself.

The 'getting' program runs until its capacity to pass off as true fails.

A true foundation meets the 'undermining' habit of a lifetime, the premature and false ego interjection and manipulative frameworks that would abort the new life.

Breaking the habit of believing one's thoughts when such conflicted self is triggered, is the willingness to not invest in the false.

It is not the success of a presumed capacity to DO the true.

Substitutes for life operate a sense of disconnect' no matter how seemingly alluring or compelling. Honesty is a capacity and willingness of direct inner knowing. It all comes down to a core sense of worth - that is both self AND other - but when self is held unworthy, all else becomes false witness a masking off and hiding of.

It's all about love - but not as society defines love. Love is being with what is true - of you - with others. Unconditional acceptance for who you are is from within your life - not a result of getting or becoming worthy, or getting away from or overcoming guilt, fear, shame, and lack.

Trying to 'solve' inner conflict 'out there' cannot work, but where it can seem to temporarily provide fantasy solution, can set up addictive identity patterns that seem to run you.

To what degree is the whole Pharmic and mind-capture business of a world-insanity the result of the wish for unconsciousness masking behind an identity in helplessness and blame? Honesty to an addictive pattern is no longer hiding in the mask - but opening a relationship in which choices are uncovered. Choices that can be recognized and owned and thus changed for a better or more truly aligned sense of worth. The attempt to struggle with, overcome or eradicate choices (our own will - conscious or not) is evasion of self honesty. The voice for such obfuscation needs to become recognisable as the 'old' choice no matter what it says. Pause and listen anew.

The main problem is that we're a species that is so dependent on our parental figures that society itself breeds this schizophrenic mind. Add to that religion and other superstitions and beliefs which by adulthood turn us into glorified reaction machines based on the deep programming of survival.

Honestly, I don't think there is a solution to this epidemic unless we "reformat"the way life goes. With financial systems and resources entrenched in the status quo, I think the only way this will happen is via a huge disaster... Vote giant meteor for President, lol.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

- Robert A. Heinlein

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